Current events in the words of the students of Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur

Birth of Alphabet

The following article is based on my own interpretation of the said events. Any material borrowed from published and unpublished sources has been appropriately referenced. I will bear the sole responsibility for anything that is found to have been copied or misappropriated or misrepresented in the following post.

Google is creating a new publicly traded company called ‘Alphabet‘ to house all of its disparate businesses. Alphabet will be run by Google’s co-founder Larry Page(CEO) and Sergey Brin(President), and Google will become a subsidiary of Alphabet with a new CEO ‘Sundar Pichai’. Sundar will be the new CEO of ‘slimmed down Google’. Larry Page made this announcement through his blog post on 10th August, 2015.

Alphabet will be a collection of companies of which Google will be the largest but Google itself will be slimmed down excluding the arms which are ‘pretty far afield’. According to Larry’s blog, ‘far afield’ products of google will be sectors like Life Sciences (that works on the glucose-sensing contact lens), Calico (focused on longevity). Alphabet will also include X-lab which incubates new efforts like Wing, Google’s drone delivery effort, Nest, Google’s home automation venture, etc. Google also is planning to increase its investment arms – Ventures and Capital, as a part of new structure. According to company’s SEC filing, Alphabet will eventually replace google as the publicly traded company on the Nasdaq stock exchange and all shares of Google will convert to shares of Alphabet.

Google will continue running its internet centric arms like YouTube, Android, Chrome, Google Maps, etc. headed by Sundar Pichai. Sundar, an IIT KGP alumnus, said in one of the interviews that ‘internet acts as a great equalizer’ – a researcher trying to search in google will get same result as a student trying to find a result in remote village. Google, which started in 1998, has grown considerably from just a search engine and spread across considerably different sectors. Its efforts like ‘Project Loon’, which targets to give internet access to very remote places in the world, clearly depicts that it is trying to make internet as the ‘great equalizer’ to its true sense.

Google as an organization spread across in the last few years in various fields starting from Life science to Robotics and self-driven cars. Google is not a software based organization any more. Separating its different arms to act like ‘independent companies and develop their own brands’ came at the right time from Google when it is spreading in all sectors. Larry, CEO of Alphabet, mentioned in his blog “We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language” and gave Alphabet a unique company url: https://abc.xyz/. Google has given 1 billion users its mobile platform (android) and hope Alphabet will continue to keep internet and other services open for citizens of the world and will work towards the better development of humanity.